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It started as a quiet walk in the woods as Saint and I went looking for a log suitable for cutting wooden discs to turn into place cards for Christmas Breakfast.

And it ended in this.

As we passed the junk scrap wood pile, I noticed the legs I’d kept from a piece of furniture that we dismantled for another project. It’s hard to throw away good bones. I dragged it to the house where it sat under the deck for a few days, just long enough for it to call out to the weathered pallet propped against the wood pile. Saint and his saw soon merged the two into the “canvas.”

This is the back side where he cut and attached the pallet wood to the frame.

I downloaded a deer silhouette from Pinterest.

I positioned it on the “canvas” and set about using a stipple brush and some old jar of off white paint and water to whitewash the boards around the stencil.

So then it was just a matter of deciding how to adorn it. I had already decided what to do with it. It looked like something our daughter-in-law would like. But then I wasn’t sure. She was coming over soon, so I told Saint we would put it on our porch; if she noticed it and liked it, it would be hers. If not, it looked pretty good right on our front porch.

It went home with her! And she left something much better…but just for the weekend. And that’s the PLAN part of this post.

The Polar Express has long been one of my favorite Christmas read-alouds, probably beginning with the year that actress Tess Harper came to our classroom and read it to the kids. She cried. I cried. We were neither one sure the kids enjoyed it half as much as we did. Anyway, the plan was to create our little Polar Express tour of area Christmas lights with our granddaughter and her adorable friend.

I made tickets and bells. They wore their pajamas and hats…

And we boarded the train Avalanche with blankets, snack mix, and hot chocolate.

Saint “engineered” us to the lights.

After seeing the lights in rural Rogersville and a trip by the turn of the century home where we lived for several years, the girls voted to skip Springfield in favor of the horse drawn carriage ride through the Ozark City Park light display.

And even though it was a mild 50 degree evening, we thought we needed snow. We tried to create our own using a combination of corn starch, shaving cream, and iridescent snow flakes.

You can’t fool Mother Nature! It was too warm for snow. The iridescent flakes hurt the girls’ hands. The mixture wouldn’t stick together enough to make a snowman, but did manage to stick in every crack and crevice in the kitchen floor. That project was filed in…you guessed it…13.

We did successfully complete a couple of others.

And have a fun breakfast with these DEER young ladies before our adventure ended.

The wooden discs are still waiting in the work room. We’ll see what happens. I believe! Maybe the next post.